stevebee92653 wrote:Not one of you agrees with one iota of anything I say, that is for certain.

Actually, I'm not certain what it is that you've said. There's one population number at one time, and another population number at another time, so there's an average growth rate between those two times, and... then what? What does that say; what's the next step you want us to take, and how do we get there from here?

stevebee92653 wrote:Thanks for the great discussion. It was fun. I am sure we will meet again on some other thread or venue. This one is beyond old and not interesting. We can conclude that you are 100% in lockstep, as is usual for evolutionauts. There is no mixture of thought. Yours is pure and unbending. Not one of you agrees with one iota of anything I say, that is for certain. I leave this thread a tiny bit amazed that that is the case. (Very tiny.) It's pretty hard in any venue to get a 100% agreement on anything. You should be proud of yourselves. I am sure you are. Keep checking those tropical fish for new organ systems cali. And take care of the chihuahuas shrunk.

So I am taking my toys and leaving. Booo Hoooo. I can't take it anymore. I have lost the battle. You are right. I am wrong. You win. You have completely debunked everything I said. And all my math. You are true science. My assertions are wrong. I am not capable of logical thinking. My rhetoric isn't grammar school quality. (Just trying to save you "post-stevebee" writing time. I hope this is sufficient.) Adios again. Over and out.

MODNOTEOff topic posts merged with this thread in feedback. The feedback forum or PMs to mods are the place for discussion of moderation so if people could contain it to there that would be helpful in keeping discussion on track.

stevebee92653 wrote:We can conclude that you are 100% in lockstep, as is usual for evolutionauts. There is no mixture of thought. Yours is pure and unbending. Not one of you agrees with one iota of anything I say, that is for certain.

Um yeeaaaahhh... Steve is insisting that 2+2=22, everyone else says no it's 4. And because we are all "in lockstep" with "no mixture of thought" (none saying that it might actually be as high as 6 for instance), it is we who have got it wrong.Once again it appears that Steve thinks this MUST be the case, because the alternative conclusion, that he might be the only one who has gotten it wrong, is just to horrible and unacceptable to bear.

I was urging to say that as I was reading his posts thanks for saying it.. Good lord, If EVERYONE else is not agreing with you it doesn't automaticaly makle them wrong (Not automatically make them right either but you know.. Evidence pile there is pretty conclusive..)

The whole point, though, Wuffy, is that evidence in quantity has been provided demonstrating that real human population numbers do not conform to Stevebee's naive constant doubling assertion. The REAL path of human population numbers has been a long, complex one, with ups and downs throughout the 200,000 year existence of our species in its approximately present form. Initially, the population was restrained by carrying capacity - at its simplest, how much food was available to them, though carrying capacity considered rigorously includes other factors - however, even considering the simplified case still drives a tank battalion through Stevebee's assertion. However, human population grew as humans started slowly moving out of Africa into other parts of the world, but in those parts of the world. carrying capacity still acted as a brake upon exponential growth, and kept numbers restrained because there's a limit to how many hunter gatherer humans a given tract of land can support. During this long period of expansion, which was spread over several millennia because humans were limited to walking as their means of moving into new locations, population was subject to various local rises and falls, subject to such variables as weather (and how that impacted upon food availability), the appearance of virulent strains of pathogenic micro-organisms that resulted in severe depopulation or even extinction of local tribal groups in some places, predation, and assorted natural disasters.

In fact, it probably wouldn't take long to write a computer program to simulate this slow migration process, and determine courtesy of this, that this process alone makes a mockery of Steve's assertion that population doubling held uniformly throughout the entire history of the human species, because population growth by expansion into new territory is restricted by the fact that such growth can only take place at the edge of the population - carrying capacity stops population growth away from the edge of expansion, and population expansion by migration can only increase proportional to the area of territory migrated into, which means that expansion during this period was closer to a t2 type function than an at type function. If you write such a simulation, and store the population numbers in an array year on year, you can determine if this is the case, quite simply, by performing a log-log transform plot of the data over time. If you perform a log-log transform plot, and end up with a straight line whose slope is equal to 2 (within the limits of experimental error of course), then your population growth function is of the form at2, where a is an appropriate constant of proportionality. In fact, I might have fun doing this myself with a quick bit of Visual Basic code to see what happens.

Then, of course, we hit the next brake, which is the point where humans have colonised all possible available land areas. At this point, carrying capacity brings expansion to a halt once more, and again, human population number manifestly do not conform to Steve's naive assertion.

At this point, however, something interesting happens. Humans alight upon the idea of growing food. Humans discover farming. Which means that now, the carrying capacity of those environments where farming is possible has increased, and population can begin expanding again. Welcome to the dawn of civilisation.

However, human population numbers are still limited by the new carrying capacity, and when human numbers start to approach that, the brakes are applied to population increase once more. Don't forget, also, that humans are still, during this period, subject to the vagaries of weather, disease, predation (though to a more limited extent than before once urbanisation starts to grow apace), and consequently, population variation is again marked by local rises and falls due to these factors. Plus, we now have to factor in a new variable - the propensity of humans to engage in internecine warfare. During the hunter-gatherer stage, when groups were small, and encounters relatively infrequent, internecine warfare was a minor contributor to population dynamics, but with the advent of civilisation, and the advent of organised warfare, this becomes a larger contributor to population dynamics, as humans are now able to engage in killing each other on a scale not previously possible. During the hunter gatherer stage, tribal conflict would probably result in fatalities of the order of between 10 and 100, but once humans organised into societies, and these started to develop armies, a single encounter could result in 10,000 or more dead. This, of course, would be limited by technology, but would still involve two to three orders of magnitude of increased capability in this area.

This situation persists for another few millennia, until we reach the stage where Europeans start developing science, and start applying the knowledge obtained thereby to a whole host of relevant areas - farming, transport, and of course, the technology of war - and then start engaging in the process of imperial conquest. There's another rise in numbers, as Europeans equipped with ever more sophisticated science-based farming, transport and military technology start a new wave of colonisation, frequently displacing or exterminating outright indigenous humans not possessing those tools, and start moving from being a primarily agricultural species to a species increasingly possessing an industrial capability. Only once a science-based industrial capability is widely available, which has only been a recent development, do we see human numbers undergo an exponential rise of the sort Steve wishes to postulate took place throughout the entire history of our species, and despite being repeatedly told that applying recent data to a past in which entirely different conditions applied is plain, flat, wrong, he refuses to accept this basic fact, and pretends that his naive assertion dictates how real human population dynamics has behaved throughout human history.

But then, is anyone surprised at this? Creationists operate on the basis of believing that their pet wishful thinking dictates to reality, and that reality is obliged to conform to whatever wacky ideas they dream up. The idea of shaping one's ideas to fit reality is wholly alien to them, and Steve has demonstrated this on an epic scale in this thread, by continually refusing to accept the basic idea that when your assertions and reality disagree, it's your assertions that are wrong, not reality.

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stevebee92653 wrote:We can conclude that you are 100% in lockstep, as is usual for evolutionauts. There is no mixture of thought. Yours is pure and unbending. Not one of you agrees with one iota of anything I say, that is for certain.

Um yeeaaaahhh... Steve is insisting that 2+2=22, everyone else says no it's 4. And because we are all "in lockstep" with "no mixture of thought" (none saying that it might actually be as high as 6 for instance), it is we who have got it wrong.Once again it appears that Steve thinks this MUST be the case, because the alternative conclusion, that he might be the only one who has gotten it wrong, is just to horrible and unacceptable to bear.

I was urging to say that as I was reading his posts thanks for saying it.. Good lord, If EVERYONE else is not agreing with you it doesn't automaticaly makle them wrong (Not automatically make them right either but you know.. Evidence pile there is pretty conclusive..)

The thing is his basic claim that a 150 year doubling period is historically applicable does not match observed reailty, there was a period in England where the population remained unchanged for about 6-7 centuries. This period was one where agricultural technology and crop types did not really change, so the carrying capacity of the land and the effort required to work it remained stable.

If we extraplolate those 6 centuries we arrive at a doubling period well in excess of the the 6-9K years that Steve thinks is such a paradox. This is Steve's error, he is taking a rate seen after the arrival of pre-modern agriculture and applying it back to times of primitive agriculture and then to no agriculture at all.

Modern crops produce at much higher levels than crops 1000 years ago, there is reasonable good data for places such as early russia that shows the huge differences in maximum food production between then and today.

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Calilasseia wrote:...Plus, we now have to factor in a new variable - the propensity of humans to engage in internecine warfare. During the hunter-gatherer stage, when groups were small, and encounters relatively infrequent, internecine warfare was a minor contributor to population dynamics, but with the advent of civilisation, and the advent of organised warfare, this becomes a larger contributor to population dynamics, as humans are now able to engage in killing each other on a scale not previously possible. During the hunter gatherer stage, tribal conflict would probably result in fatalities of the order of between 10 and 100, but once humans organised into societies, and these started to develop armies, a single encounter could result in 10,000 or more dead. This, of course, would be limited by technology, but would still involve two to three orders of magnitude of increased capability in this area...

I recently read Gwynne Dyer's book "War" wherein he argues the position that although the kill rate per incident of hunter/gatherers is low it is constant and actually has a very similar outcome per population size as in 'civilised' warfare (now that has to be an oxymoron) which has extremes of peace and very violent. He actually did the numbers and showed that WWII killed no more % of the population than the Yanomami did in the same length of time.

The problem with fantasies is you can't really insist that everyone else believes in yours, the other problem with fantasies is that most believers of fantasies eventually get around to doing exactly that.

Calilasseia wrote:...Plus, we now have to factor in a new variable - the propensity of humans to engage in internecine warfare. During the hunter-gatherer stage, when groups were small, and encounters relatively infrequent, internecine warfare was a minor contributor to population dynamics, but with the advent of civilisation, and the advent of organised warfare, this becomes a larger contributor to population dynamics, as humans are now able to engage in killing each other on a scale not previously possible. During the hunter gatherer stage, tribal conflict would probably result in fatalities of the order of between 10 and 100, but once humans organised into societies, and these started to develop armies, a single encounter could result in 10,000 or more dead. This, of course, would be limited by technology, but would still involve two to three orders of magnitude of increased capability in this area...

I recently read Gwynne Dyer's book "War" wherein he argues the position that although the kill rate per incident of hunter/gatherers is low it is constant and actually has a very similar outcome per population size as in 'civilised' warfare (now that has to be an oxymoron) which has extremes of peace and very violent. He actually did the numbers and showed that WWII killed no more % of the population than the Yanomami did in the same length of time.

Ah, I was working with absolute numbers, not proportions of the population. This is interesting. Would it tie in with Robinson's work on warfare perchance, as documented briefly in Carl Sagan's book Cosmos ... ???

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Calilasseia wrote:Ah, I was working with absolute numbers, not proportions of the population.

Good post just then by the way (would be a complete waste of course if we only did this for Steve's benefit, but then you know that at least that as well as I. )

I was thinking the same thing. Yes 'ancestral' war killed far less, but there were also far less people (especially in the earliest days of our species) so it could have possibly have as great an effect or more. By way of example: Imagine if our earliest ancestors first split into two competing tribes for some reason, a conflict between them could have decimated the population - and indeed risked the entire species' continuation, while in real numbers only killing a few. But the death toll required to have anyway near that effect today would be horrendous.

Calilasseia wrote:...Plus, we now have to factor in a new variable - the propensity of humans to engage in internecine warfare. During the hunter-gatherer stage, when groups were small, and encounters relatively infrequent, internecine warfare was a minor contributor to population dynamics, but with the advent of civilisation, and the advent of organised warfare, this becomes a larger contributor to population dynamics, as humans are now able to engage in killing each other on a scale not previously possible. During the hunter gatherer stage, tribal conflict would probably result in fatalities of the order of between 10 and 100, but once humans organised into societies, and these started to develop armies, a single encounter could result in 10,000 or more dead. This, of course, would be limited by technology, but would still involve two to three orders of magnitude of increased capability in this area...

I recently read Gwynne Dyer's book "War" wherein he argues the position that although the kill rate per incident of hunter/gatherers is low it is constant and actually has a very similar outcome per population size as in 'civilised' warfare (now that has to be an oxymoron) which has extremes of peace and very violent. He actually did the numbers and showed that WWII killed no more % of the population than the Yanomami did in the same length of time.

Ah, I was working with absolute numbers, not proportions of the population. This is interesting. Would it tie in with Robinson's work on warfare perchance, as documented briefly in Carl Sagan's book Cosmos ... ???

Well, you just exceeded my information on the topic, sorry. Hopefully others could chime in with something on that, it is an interesting direction to explore a little.

The problem with fantasies is you can't really insist that everyone else believes in yours, the other problem with fantasies is that most believers of fantasies eventually get around to doing exactly that.

First of all, I mis-quoted the name. I was partly on the right track, but only partly.

I'm referring here to the work of Lewis Fry Richardson (I should have learned by now to go to the attic and dig out the book, instead of relying upon a memory that isn't 100% perfect), who was one of the first mathematicians to suggest that statistical modelling may be applicable to weather. However, he is also known for his mathematical analysis of warfare. His seminal work in the field is called The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, which he compiled as an ardent pacifist, hoping to provide mathematical arguments that would act as a robust means of avoiding war.

In this work, he determined, on the basis of the analysis of the large body of data on human warfare, that it was possible to assign a probability value to a given conflict, based upon the number of fatalities and the time that elapsed between instance of conflicts of the same size. So, for example, it is possible to determine how long one has to wait, on average, for a conflict that results in 1,000 deaths, or 10,000 deaths, or 100,000 deaths, etc. He devised a logarithmic scale for measuring such conflicts (using base 10 logarithms), which he defined as his mortality index, M. M=3 corresponds to a conflict resulting in 1,000 deaths, M=4 to a conflict resulting in 10,000 deaths, M=5 to a conflict resulting in 100,000 deaths, etc.

The interesting part about Richardson's analysis is that it predicts, to a pretty close approximation, the worldwide incidence of murder, if one defines this as a conflict resulting in one death (M=0). Richardson's graph gives the elapsed time one has to wait between murders around the globe as approximately once every 5 minutes, which is pretty close to the actual figure arising from law enforcement statistics. At the other end of the scale, Richardson predicts how long we have to wait for a conflict resulting in the complete extermination of our species (M=9.7 or thereabouts): according to him, if we don't mend our ways, we have about 1,000 years left. To make matters even more chilling, there is some debate as to the effect upon Richardson's curve at the upper end arising from the development and acquisition of nuclear weapons, which, for the first time, give humans access to a technology that would facilitate the launching of an M=9.7 conflict that would come to an end in a relatively short space of time. In a deep sense, Richardson's work points to the fact that warfare is nothing more than murder writ large, and that we need to think long and hard about how we conduct relations with each other on the geopolitical landscape.

Oh, and Richardson's work on coastlines is seen today as the precursor of modern fractal mathematics. He was quite an insightful individual.

EDIT: Oh, it also appears that he laid the foundations for a number of valuable techniques for solving difference equations, which are the discrete analogues of differential equations, which has import with respect to the scientific papers I've cited on population dynamics. Indeed, Richardson's work in the field of numerical analysis has led, amongst other developments, to such tools as Romberg integration, and a number of methods for attacking otherwise difficult differential equations numerically.

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I was unaware of this exercise in hot air that Stevebee had made but it was a good read nonetheless.

What I took from it apart from the excellent research and arguments put up by the usual guys was again Stevebee's belief that despite there being solid and transparent facts and figures, he seems to think that those who agree with them are wrong and that in addition to his demonstrable errors he remains correct.

I wouldn't have believed it unless I had read it here in black and white.

To most Christians, the bible is like a software license. Nobody actually reads it, they just scroll to the bottom and click 'I agree'.

"Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today." - Lawrence Krauss

Religion? wrote:I was unaware of this exercise in hot air that Stevebee had made but it was a good read nonetheless.

What I took from it apart from the excellent research and arguments put up by the usual guys was again Stevebee's belief that despite there being solid and transparent facts and figures, he seems to think that those who agree with them are wrong and that in addition to his demonstrable errors he remains correct.

I wouldn't have believed it unless I had read it here in black and white.

Not to mention the hilarity that is "my assertions are right, therefore when reality disagrees with them, reality is wrong", which was, in effect, his position. As is clearly evident from relevant past posts in this thread.

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Calilasseia wrote: Not to mention the hilarity that is "my assertions are right, therefore when reality disagrees with them, reality is wrong", which was, in effect, his position. As is clearly evident from relevant past posts in this thread.

I find his position here even more inscrutably stupid than that. To paraphrase: "It is not physically possible for the human population to keep doubling at a constant rate of every 150 years for 200,000 years. The human population has not been doubling at a constant rate of every 150 years for 200,000 years. Therefore, evolution is a lie."

stevebee92653 wrote:The word is bio-system, not biosystem. You might note the hyphen in my version. The term is independently mine as far as I know. And it means "interdependent groups of organs" on my site.

So you will be retracting your claim that a Bird Nest (which is not an "interdependent groups of organs") is a Bio-system, then?

No.

"A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime." -Oscar Wilde